Hi — I am a student working on a dissertation on the perceptions of school counselors and administrators regarding support services needed by the online students. I want to use a mixed methods approach with surveys of the entire pool of counselors in my district combined with a focus groups to get a richer discussion. Identifying my focus groups participants has me stuck in my methodology chapter I’m not sure how to select participants. Do I select persons who are in schools supportive of online learning, based on their surveys, or do I use participants in schools who are resistant to online learning? I’m writing all this in a round about way of saying, I really sympathize with the student Getting down to the nuts and bolts of the participants and methodology seems particularly challenging in virtual school research. Comments? :) Thanks again to Michael for all your interest and lively thought provoking discussions for the lonely dissertation writers out here in the world. :)

At the time I didn’t really respond to her question, as I told her that I’d try to write a complete entry on the topic (and I’m finally getting around to it now).

In all honesty, there isn’t any published research that I am familiar with that specifically focuses on the school counselors and/or administrators. In looking at the broader topic of support services, there are two things I think are a starting point.

The first is the work that has been done by Margaret Roblyer on the Educational Success Predict Instrument (ESPRI). The ESPRI was designed to predict student success in K-12 online learning courses, and has been shown to be a quite reliable measure. The reason this is a good starting point is because the nature of the instrument looks at what factors affect student success – which is not directly focused on support services, but I believe gives us a sense of the knowledge, skills, abilities, and dispositions that students need (and the flip side of that means that if students don’t possess these knowledge, skills, abilities, and dispositions that school-based personnel need to help support the students in attaining or remediating).

The second area that I think is worth looking at as a starting point for this kind of topic is looking at the role of the site facilitator, mediating teacher, or other school-based personnel (which is also I think much closer to the original topic too, so I won’t go into why I think this is connected).

Compton, L. & Davis, N. (2010). The impact of and the key elements for a successful virtual early field experience: Lessons learned from a case study. Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education, 10(3), 309-337. AACE. Retrieved from http://www.editlib.org/p/30479.

Davis, N. E., & Roblyer, M. D. (2005). Preparing teachers for the “schools that technology built”: Evaluation of a program to train teachers for virtual schooling. Journal of Research on Technology in Education, 37(4), 399-409.

Mulcahy, D. M., Dibbon, D., & Norberg, C. (2008). An investigation into the nature of education in a rural and remote region of Newfoundland and Labrador: The Straits. St. John’s, NL: The Harris Centre, Memorial University of Newfoundland.

As always, I’d like to ask my research-focused colleagues… Is there additional advice that you’d provide this student?

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WCET did some work in this area a few years ago for post-secondary. I haven’t seen much follow-up for K-12,although most of the concepts and practices seemed transferable. There is a “Guide to Developing Online Student Services” at http://bit.ly/faVx9b , and a follow-up project “Beyond the Administrative Core: Creating Web-based Student Services for Online Learners.” This latter reference appears to have been pulled from WCET and WICHE sites, but it has been referenced in later research articles.